


Good for the Soul

by glimmerglanger



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, Thor (Movies)
Genre: Bad Things Happen Bingo, Blood and Violence, Established Relationship, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Infinity War AU, M/M, Prompt: Playing with Puppets, Prompt: Shaky hands, Whumptober 2019
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-03
Updated: 2019-10-03
Packaged: 2020-11-22 22:00:54
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,598
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20881352
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/glimmerglanger/pseuds/glimmerglanger
Summary: They were almost to Midgard when the attack came, almost to the promise of safety when that was all dashed to pieces by an attack from a force they could not overcome. Loki didn’t have to wait for the boarding parties to start cutting down Asgardians to know what they faced.He’d have recognized Thanos’s ships anywhere.Loki should have known something like this was doomed to happen. They’dfinallyfound the space to breath, a chance for unexpected happiness, and so, of course, the universe had to step in. The last few weeks, stressful as they had been, crossing the blackness of space, had been a gift they apparently had to pay for.Written to fill the Bad Things Happen Bingo Prompt for “Playing with Puppets” (two more prompts 'til a bingo!) and the Whumptober prompt for “Shaky Hands.” Please heed the warnings and know that I take making bad things happen seriously.





	Good for the Soul

**Author's Note:**

> This is an Infinity War AU wherein Thanos went to Earth personally before heading to the Asgardian refugee fleet, ending up with the Power, Mind, and Time Stones before anyone knew what was happening.
> 
> Written to fill the Bad Things Happen Bingo Prompt for “Playing with Puppets” and the Whumptober prompt for “Shaky Hands.”

They were almost to Midgard when the attack came, almost to the promise of safety when that was all dashed to pieces by an attack from a force they could not overcome. Loki didn’t have to wait for the boarding parties to start cutting down Asgardians to know what they faced.

He’d have recognized Thanos’s ships anywhere.

Loki should have known something like this was doomed to happen. They’d _finally_ found the space to breath, a chance for unexpected happiness, and so, of course, the universe had to step in. The last few weeks, stressful as they had been, crossing the blackness of space, had been a gift they apparently had to pay for.

He had not, really, anticipated that Thanos would come for him directly. He had not been prepared to see the man strolling into the bridge, flanked by his guards and his attack dogs, ready and willing to take them apart.

The fight barely even deserved to be called such. Thanos murdered Heimdall and the crew. Destroyed Banner. Waved around the ugly, golden glove on his hand and Loki saw then that there were three Stones sunk into it already.

Not that it mattered. Not that very much mattered at all, when Thanos looked across at him and at Thor and smiled. 

Plans ran through Loki’s mind, one after another. He needed to get away, he needed to get _Thor_ away, after everything that had happened between them, he could not even consider leaving Thor behind. That morning, waking up warm and peaceful, seemed a lifetime ago, and he needed to figure out how to get them back there, back to that safe place, but he had no time to act on any of them. Not before Thanos had managed to drag Thor close, his voice pitched low, his Gauntlet raised near Thor’s head.

Loki froze in place, unsure how best to fix _any_ of the myriad things that had just gone wrong, and then Thor turned to stare at him.

The thing was, Thor’s eye was blue. Blue as the sky on a clear day when he was in a good mood, darker and grayer when his temper took him. Loki knew every color it could be, had seen them all over the long years of their lives, had spent a lot of time, of late, staring into his eye while they spoke and touched and learned one another anew.

When Thor turned to look at him, expression wiped clean and blank, his remaining eye was no color Loki recognized. The blue had turned too-bright. Sickly. Thor flexed his fingers in and out, not lunging for Thanos, who stood behind him, grinning. 

Loki looked between them, heart jack-rabbiting in his chest, and took a step back. He reached for the shadows that hung between the light - he needed to _flee_, he saw that, there was nothing of the Thor he knew left in his empty expression - and found his magic distant and unreachable.

“Ah,” Thanos said, shaking his head. Thor took a step towards him, hesitant and jerky. “I think you need to stay right here, don’t you?”

Loki swallowed. Around them, the ship burned. He could hear people crying, alarms blaring. He wetted his lips, weaving back another step, hands up and open. He tried a smile. “Thor? Thor, why don’t you--”

“He can’t hear you,” Thanos said, eyes beady, face shadowed oddly by the flames around them. “Or maybe he can. I suppose that might be interesting. But it won’t change anything.” He rubbed at the Stones in the Gauntlet around his hand and said, “Do it.”

Thor put his chin down and walked right through the spot of fire that Loki had dodged around. Loki tripped back; there was _nowhere to go_. Half of the bridge had come down around them. He looked over his shoulder, quick, and Thor grabbed the front of his leathers, jerking him to a stop.

Loki jerked against his hold. It was like trying to pull free of a star’s gravity. Thor stared at him, iris neon blue, expression utterly empty. And Loki knew, hating the knowledge, exactly what Thanos must have planned.

Loki’d threatened a Midgardian woman with the same thing, once.

He couldn’t remember her name.

“Thor,” he said, smiling, because he ever had when he didn’t know what else to do. “This is--you can fight this--you--” The words strangled themselves in his throat when Thor raised his arm, slow and jerky, like a broken doll or a faulty machine. “Thor--”

The first blow left his ears ringing and the taste of blood in his mouth. He found himself gripping at Thor’s wrist for balance. The muscles under Thor’s skin trembled. “I probably deserved that,” he panted, trying to reach Thor with words. “But, Thor--”

Thor shoved him back, back against the nearest bulkhead. There must have been a fire behind it. Heat lashed out at him, stinging all along his back. He thrashed, and the next blow caught him in the gut. He tried to curl over. Thor held him too tight against the painful heat, but Loki could feel the shaking in his fingers, now.

It was so strange, to have Thor beat him. It was throwing him off. He’d grown used to trusting Thor with his body, to associating his hands with pleasant shivers, warm touches, comfort in the dark of night, when the nightmares came.

“Listen,” he said, when he could breathe again. Thor was just _standing there_, arm drawn back, eye empty as his expression. “You don’t have to--”

The impact stole his words and cracked something inside his chest, but at least Thor pulled him away from the burning metal, even if it was only to bring his knee up into Loki’s gut, in one solid impact of agony.

Thor left go of him, then, letting him bend over, panting for breath. Loki glanced up at him through the fall of his hair. Thor breathed hard, staring down at him, hands trembling. Loki spat on the ground. “Thor--”

Thor slammed a heel into the side of his knee. Something crunched. Loki jerked back, he had an opening, he could make it to the door and then…

Thor grabbed him before he made it two steps, seizing one of Loki’s arms, jerking him back, a blow landing across his face accompanied by another and another. They all blended together for a moment, one long stretch that ended with Loki coughing for breath, trying to roll onto his side, not even sure when he’d ended up on the ground.

A hand shoved him down, preventing the roll, pinning him against the too-hot deck. Somewhere close by, flames flickered in the corner of his wobbly vision. They cast horrible shadows across Thor’s face, where he loomed above, his eye all in the black now. He held one arm drawn back. His shaking knuckles were bloody red. 

“Beg,” Thanos said, an unwelcome intrusion into an experience already beyond terrible. His shadow fell across them. Loki could only see the vague shape of him past Thor’s shoulders. “Beg for repentance for your failures.”

Loki grinned. It hurt. “I don’t think I will, actually, I--”

He tried to curl, afterwards, but Thor left him nowhere to go. “Beg for him, then,” Thanos said, voice thick and cajoling. “What do you think this’ll do to him?” 

Loki jerked, tasting bile in the back of his throat. Thor had to be in there, somewhere. He knew that already. _Loki_ had remained cognizant, even when under Thanos’s control. Somewhere down deep, he’d seen what his body did.

Thor’s eye shone, wetly. Hours ago, he had curled an arm around Loki, telling him of places on Midgard where they might go, things they might see, discussing a _life_ neither of them seemed likely to live long enough to see. But it didn’t have to be so. One of them might make it, Loki supposed.

Loki gritted his teeth, and then stopped, because that exploded fresh agony along his jaw. “Please,” he said, staring up into Thor’s expression. “Please, forgive me, I’m so sorry I failed you on Midgard.”

“And that you stole the Space Stone,” Thanos said, lazy.

“And that I took wrongful possession of the Space Stone,” Loki said, squirming against the burning floor, the heat a fresh agony everywhere along his back. “Now let him--”

“There,” Thanos interrupted. “Confession makes you feel better, doesn’t it? It’s good that you recognize what you did wrong. But recognizing mistakes isn’t enough.” He crouched down, close enough that Loki could see the graveyard stretch of smile. “Correction is required. And suffering is good for the soul.”

“You said--” Loki protested, cut off by another explosion of pain. He wasn’t sure why he’d even tried. He’d _known_ there was almost no chance Thanos would keep his word. Their last interactions had taught him that. But he’d had to try, for Thor’s sake, for the memory of tracing his fingertips across the haphazard patterns shaved into Thor’s hair, for the remembered press of Thor’s lips to his.

He shook his head, flinching as Thor grappled at him, jerking him around on the ground. He hissed with pain when his cheek hit the floor, pushing back away from it automatically, or trying to. Thor wound fingers into his hair and shoved down, hard, crushing him against the metal and, oh. 

Oh, but of course Thanos would not have Thor merely beat him to death. That would have been too clean, wouldn’t it?

Thor yanked and pawed at him, breathing like a bellows, trembling everywhere. Loki stared into the flames too close to his face, thoughts jerky from blows to the head, from the smoke in the air, from the ache of his wounds. He thought, in bits and snatches, about what this would do to Thor.

And stopped fighting. It was all he could do. He couldn’t escape, Thanos had somehow closed all the shadowy pathways he could have fled down. He could not beat Thor in a physical brawl, and even if he did… Thanos would be there.

He closed his eyes, tried to take a bracing breath that barely managed to be a wheeze and said, “It’s alright, Thor.” He got no reply. He hadn’t expected one. He believed that Thor could hear him, somewhere. It would be important, later, that he heard. “It’s alright. It isn’t you.” 

“Shut up,” Thanos snarled, and Loki was gifted a blow below his ribs, Thor’s knuckles against his skin. 

“What are you going to do?” Loki asked, wheezing a laugh as Thor gripped at him, the touch familiar and all wrong at the same time, with shaking fingers. “Kill me?”

Thanos leaned over, grabbing Loki’s face as--as Thor--and snarling, “Eventually.”

Loki spat into his ugly face, burning and torn to pieces and laughing, louder as Thanos recoiled away from him. Thor shoved forward, movements all violence and trembling, in a way they never were, not when he was in his own mind. The jerky, wheezing, stutter of his breath echoed in the air around them.

Loki scrambled fingers across the burning ground, panted, “It’s not, it’s alright, it’s,” and gave up the fight with his thoughts. His mind wanted to go away, fleeing down passages he’d had no call to use in the last few years, to quiet, empty places where he couldn’t feel his body or the world.

He huddled there, in the quiet places inside his mind, far away from everything else. An abrupt change jerked him back into his body, which hurt everywhere. Thor had… risen, jerking to his feet. He stood over Loki, smeared here and there with wet blood, panting, staring down at his shaking hands.

Thanos said, somewhere out beyond the shadows, where at least Loki did not have to look at his face, “What are you waiting for? You _will_ obey me.”

There was something wrong with Thor’s eye, Loki noticed, in his crumble on the ground. Some strange flash of light in his pupil. And he smelled, below the smoke and the blood and the stink of sweat, something sharp and clean. Ozone. 

He smiled, honest delight bursting through his chest, and told Thanos, “You should have picked a better murder weapon.”

“What--”

And Thor roared a scream, hands going to his head as he jerked back a step. He dragged his nails down across his scalp, the sound coming from his chest not quite like anything Loki had ever heard before. 

Lightning crackling down his forearms, flowing from his palms. Loki wrapped an arm around his chest, shifting, trying to get his legs to work so he could stand. “Boy,” Thanos snarled, taking a step towards Thor, “I said--”

The light burned Loki’s vision away. But that was alright, he’d seen roughly where Thor was standing last. The heat of the blast seared his skin. But that was alright, it must have done worse to Thanos, because the shackles around Loki’s connection to the universe feel away.

He jerked to his feet, ignoring the pain it cost him, and threw himself towards where Thor had stood. Thor had his arms extended out, jerking. Loki wrapped both arms around his chest, ignoring the unpleasant tingle of electricity, and reached out for somewhere, _anywhere_, else.

They landed somewhere cool. Loki didn’t know where it was, didn’t care. Thor’s cry cut off abruptly, lightning dancing out across the soft sand around them, grounding out in dozens of different spots.

Loki blinked, spots all across his vision, with no part of his body that did not hurt, and cautiously released his hold. He needed to do that so he could fall down, which he did, legs going out to dump him onto the sand, where he dropped onto his back to stare up at unfamiliar stars.

He lay there, aware that he was bleeding and that he should probably do something about that, but too tired to try. He listened to waves wash up against the shore and the sound of Thor weeping, a terrible, wracking noise that hurt almost as much as his injuries.

He swallowed twice and cleared his throat, worried he would slur even with those precautions, and said, “It’s alright.”

“It is _not_,” Thor said, his voice flayed to shreds, but at least he stirred. He came over, his head eclipsing the stars, which stood like a crown around his hair. He knelt, hands shaking as he reached out, as though unsure where to touch. He turned his face to the side, jaw clenching as he swallowed convulsively.

Loki waved out a hand and touched his leg. He was shaking all over, then. Not just his hands. “There looks to be a village not far away,” Thor said, then, croaking the words. He reached up to his shoulders, tearing off the cloak he still wore. “We’ll take you there for--for medical care.” And then he wrapped the cloak across Loki, covering bare skin and injuries. “Can you walk?”

Loki laughed, and Thor took it as the no that it was. He jerked his chin to the side, eye squeezed closed momentarily, before he braced himself and gathered Loki up. “I’m so--”

“Don’t,” Loki rasped, dizzy from the movement. He could smell blood on Thor’s armor. Probably his, now that he thought about it. He closed his eyes, ignoring the uncomfortable snag of Thor’s cloak on the burns across his skin and the trembling in Thor’s arms, which did not fade as they made their slow way down the beach.


End file.
